XX Horror

The Feminine and the Horrific

Transmission #5

What We Did on Our Summer Holidays

6

SEP/13

The Preliminaries are Complete, We Pause Before the Crisis

The Crime

Status: SOLVED (see Transmission #6)

Sequence of Events

Players followed their own agendas

a crime has happened

Final Report

Victim: Miskatonic U — Tears of Azathoth book stolenPerpetrator: Cyrus LanferLocation: The Orne Library, 1908/same, 1933Motive: Protecting Dr. ArmitageOpportunity: Lanfer was Armitage’s assistant and couldMeans: Simple misdirection: the volume in question was placed in various positions on Lanfer’s desk for 1/4 of a century to keep it away from Armitage and any other curious persons.Mythos Angle: Armitage’s increasing obsession with this Mythos tainted volume drove his good friend to hide it from him. But he could not bring himself to destroy this precious volume.

The next crime is about to unfold. To win the refresh you so desperately need, the party MUST acquire all the facts pertaining to the case: the Victim, the Perpetrator, the Location, the Motive, the Opportunity, the Means, and the Mythos Angle. Motive and Means were skipped last time but they won’t be in future. These two aspects of the crime will require some digging. The Mythos Angle can be discovered fairly quickly — if the player is willing to pay 1 non-renewable sanity to put the pieces of the dread puzzle together.

Session Recap

Ms. Pickmann

- Poking around Kingsport to check the fallout of the events at the Yacht club.
- Oliver Gardiner is recovering from the gunshot wounds
- mini scene took about 1/2 an hour
- did the Clarice-meets-Hannibal thing and interviewed creepy sorcerer Austin Kittrel in jail as a result of a previous investigation by the crew.
- agrees to share information about the Red Wasps

The Author

Interacted with a doctor friend who was doing charity work in depression-era Arkham and had been conducting abortions as well. Said doctor had been shopped to the police by Rose Smith.. This one-on-one scene lasted about 20 minutes.

The Rest of the Crew

Once those personal inquiries were taken care of, those characters had independent action threads while 4 other players began their own scenes. Much cross cutting occurred over the next 2 hours. Rose & Angus raced into the hills near Dunwitch to see what happened to the body of a Walsh. Another PC — a cop — was heading to the same area to chase down some gangsters. This was co-incidental to the PCs but engineered by the players in director stance.

Note: there are real mysteries to solve AND a vast occult conspiracy unfolding. That is a heavy enough cognitive load for the players to manage. I have been explicit with my “screw the in-character/out-of character knowledge” attitude. There have been some real gross-out surreal mystery moments despite this baring of the devices of story-making. A very simple description of a 15 million year-old fossil strata discovered up in some Homo Sap. remains from 50 thousand years ago, and featuring the impression of a wrist watch really creeped out the crew.

The crew in the hills had their sanities compromised but not blasted as they faced down some bloated, pustulent undead minions. Meanwhile Annette Pickmann was kidnapped while trying to approach maddened Miskatonic professor F. Ashley on the verge of trying to burn the archeology wing down. Her storyline hooked up with that of Fr. Duree investigating his suspicions about the aforementioned professor. All the while Maude was pursuing private personal questions about past disturbing events and the strange medical threat that the jailed doctor saw hanging over the very woman who had turned her in.